Akhenaten

The year before Lorimer visited Amarna in 1908, the Deutsche Oricnt- Gesellschaft had been granted the concession to dig under the directorship of Ludwig Borchardt (1863 1938). This was the first attempt to conduct a large- scale excavation and topographic survey of the site, focusing on the perimeters of the southern part of the city, which were the least disturbed by previous excav­ation or expanding cultivation. Their work was interrupted by the First World War, as was the publication and exhibition of many of their findings. Borchardt's important work on the domestic buildings was not published until 1980. Among the other discoveries were some of the most famous pieces of Amarna art, now so famous that they have taken on a kitsch persona of their own: the small relief of an Amarna princess presenting a flower to a man, often identified as Meri- taten and Smenkhkare', and most famously the polychrome bust of Nefertiti. The discovery of this object, in December 1912, has spawned a mythology of its own: there are stories of how Borchardt misled the Egyptian Antiquities Service when the finds from the expedition were being divided up so as to claim the piccc for Berlin, and how it was then smuggled out of Egypt in a fruit cratc. Borchardt himself was not above hyping the discovery. He wrote:

Were I to describe this discovery here as it really took place, with its confusion, its surprises, its hopes and also its minor disappointments, the reader would ccrtainly be as confused thereby as we were at the time, when we made notes in the studio, and had hardly got the particulars of one find to paper before two further objects to be measured and noted were uncovered.^2b

This image of Nefertiti, representing a pale-skinned woman whose dis­tinguished features accord to western canons of beauty, is central to the Akhen­aten myth. A whole book could easily be written about its manifestations in popular culture. It enables a 'pretty facc' to be put on one of the principal players in the Amarna family romance, countering Victorian judgements that Nefertiti looked ugly and haggard in Amarna reliefs, and was obviously in a terminal stage of tuberculosis.²⁷ This pretty face enabled women to identify with Nefertiti's beauty. As early as 1925 Nefertiti was being invoked in literature as the paradigm of loveliness, and she became a popular identity for women to assume at fancy- dress parties in the 1920s and 1930s.²⁸

All these archaeological discoveries before the First World War enabled the pieturc of Akhenaten, his family and city, to be elaborated. Life there was one of 'domestic felicity in beautiful surroundings'.²⁹ And the idea of an Amarnutopia was to become very important in the next decade's discovery of the site.

The 1920s and 1930s: Amarna before and after Tutankhamun

In 1920 the Egypt Exploration Society regained the concession to excavate Amarna. In the course of fifteen seasons under several directors, most parts of the site were examined in wide-ranging excavations in which more than one area would be examined in a single season.³⁰

T. E. Peet (1882-1934) was the first director, assisted by the great archaeological populariser (Sir) Leonard Woolley (1880-1960). Peet and Woolley had three main aims: to find out to what extent Amarna had been occupied before Akhenaten, to consider what archaeology might suggest about the political upheavals of his reign, and to clear the town- site, the so-called South Suburb, 'so as to gather details of the architecture and arrangement of the houses, to learn more of the daily life, and to secure objects for museums'.³¹ The search for museum-quality objects led to less glamorous things being unrecorded, shown when the waste heaps from Peet's digs were excavatcd in the early 1980s. But Peet and Woolley's work was of good standard for the times, especially in its attention to stratigraphy - a lead not always taken up by those who followed them in the 1930s. They were also interested in pre­senting their results architecturally. Trained architects, such as Francis Newton and Seton Lloyd, were well represented on the dig, and the public buildings, palaces and houses of Amarna all received attention in the 1920s. Some unique building types were revealed. Amid the cultivation on the far south of the site was the so-called maru-Aten, a kind of temple for viewing the sun-disc, where paint­ings, water and foliage were juxtaposed to create an atmosphere of nature luxuri­ant but tamed; the so-called 'fan-screens', kiosks where members of the royal family notionally rejuvenated themselves by basking in the sun's rays; and what seemed to be a decorated aviary in the north palace near el-Till (see Figure 2.7).